IQ
by eight 0f hearts
Summary: "This was not how the world worked. Sherlock was the amazing one... not Anderson, and certainly not dinosaurs." Sherlock becomes paranoid that John no longer realises his genius and that he's about to lose his friendship. Cue him desperately scrambling around doing increasingly ridiculous things to prove his brilliance. John has no idea why Sherlock is behaving so oddly.
1. A Jurassic Problem

**For this prompt on the meme of kink:**

_"John compliments someone else in the way he usually does Sherlock (that's amazing, extraordinary etc) in Sherlock's hearing, once or multiple times. Cue Sherlock becoming paranoid, and desperately scrambling around doing increasingly ridiculous things to prove to John that he is the brilliant one. John has no idea why Sherlock is behaving so oddly. Whether they figure it out or not is up to you._

_(Bonus points if the complimentee is Anderson.)"_

* * *

Parties. There was a reason Sherlock Holmes hated them - well, several reasons, boiling down to a combination of the alcohol and noise and amount of half-witted people gathered in one spot, not to mention the general pointlessness of lingering near the munchies table picking at Doritos when he could just as well have been having Chinese with John in a quiet restaurant winding down at the end of a long and tedious case.

Unfortunately, Lestrade had had other ideas. The 'Blacktown Butcher', as the media had nicknamed him, infamous for carving up five women before Scotland Yard came to their senses and called Sherlock in, two more before Sherlock worked out who he was, and had been in the process of slicing and dicing an eighth when the police burst into his warehouse (always a warehouse, uncreative, uncreative) and announced he was under arrest. Now the butcher was behind bars and Sherlock had been forced into this utterly hateful conglomeration of plebeian police officers celebrating their victory with plastic cups of champagne and snacks from the vending machine down the hall.

Hardly Sherlock's idea of a good time.

He would have been out of there as soon as the case was over if it wasn't for a certain John Watson, who had thwarted his plans by accepting a drink, joining in the inane toasts (to things like 'justice' which Sherlock personally thought was absurd, justice was a concept and honouring it like a person was really kind of pointless) and was now laughing and joking with a group of officers some way away, totally oblivious to Sherlock's suffering.

Yes, suffering! Because it was honestly painful to think about how much time he was wasting standing here eating slightly stale corn chips watching Anderson making a fool of himself by… actually, he wasn't sure what Anderson was doing, but it was stupid, whatever it was.

"Having fun?"

Lestrade had come up by his shoulder, nursing a cup of tea (where did he get tea from, there was only champagne here, Sherlock wanted tea too).

Sherlock didn't bother responding to such an asinine question, though he did deign to give Lestrade a quick glance (wife hasn't called, just spoke to Dimmock, needs to floss teeth) before giving a disdainful sniff and consuming another dorito.

"John seems to be enjoying himself," Lestrade continued, gazing over at said doctor who was currently watching Anderson with rapt attention as the other man spoke animatedly. From this distance Sherlock couldn't hear what he was saying but if he was reading the lips correctly (and of course he was, because the great Holmes is never incorrect) it was something to do with dinosaur fossils.

Okay, this was going too far, since when was John interested in paleontology?

"And I personally thought Gregg was a bit unfair, you're not even listening to me, are you?"

Sherlock turned his attention back to Lestrade irritably. "Of course not," he replied. "Not when you're talking about such menial things."

Lestrade just gave a long suffering sigh, patted Sherlock on the arm and muttered something about Masterchef and going to the pub before exiting the room. Sherlock watched him leave with barely contained envy (how come HE gets to escape?) before deciding that enough was enough. Sherlock didn't want to be here therefore they would leave and John would just have to deal with being dragged away from the free drinks and Anderon's apparently riveting-

"Brilliant!"

Sherlock froze, immediately attuned to that tone of voice. That was John's Sherlock-you-are-so-amazing tone, and he automatically preened. Although to be honest, he wasn't quite certain what John was praising him for, because the only spectacular thing he had done in the last few minutes was polish off the last of the chips so as to deprive the Yarders of the junk food. Really he was doing them a favour, some of them had mentioned diets which they were quite obviously breaking.

Perhaps John was praising him for simply existing, which he wouldn't be surprised about. Sherlock was quite aware that he was an extraordinary person, on a higher intellectual plane than most other humans-

"Really, that's amazing."

And crash! Back down to reality as he realised with growing horror that John's comments were addressed to, of all people… Anderson?

It was like a slap in the face. Sherlock could actually feel his blood growing cold. To add insult to injury, John was now shaking Anderson's hand - Anderson, who made lame Jurassic Park references and was about as amazing as a tin of corned beef.

With great effort Sherlock managed to adjust his features from stunned mullet to angry scowl to mask of aloof scornfulness, and walked calmly over to stand next to John, glowering at Anderson.

"Sherlock," John greeted with a smile, as if he hadn't just committed an act of complete and utter betrayal.

"John," Sherlock replied coldly. "Anderson." This last word said with the sort of derision he usually reserved for comments about Mycroft's diet.

Anderson just gave him an odd look. "Evening," he said carefully, as though Sherlock's greeting had to be some sort of trap. Sherlock wanted to shake John; couldn't he see that Anderson was obviously one of the dimmer specimens of humanity?

"We've been having a fascinating chat," John went on. "Anderson went on a paleontology excursion to the Sahara last year, dug up dinosaur bones and everything."

"How intriguing," Sherlock said flatly.

"It's actually quite interesting!" John continued, oblivious to Sherlock's mental anguish.

Anderson gave a tight smile. "I suppose you're as knowledgeable about dinosaurs as you are about everything else?" he asked Sherlock, and Sherlock picked up on the underlying challenge. This was obviously some sort of test… Anderson was questioning his genius. This was Anderson's area of expertise. He thought he knew more about this.

The problem was, he apparently did. Sherlock wracked his brains for any sort of intelligent fact he could find about prehistoric wildlife. He rummaged furiously through his mental filing cabinet only to find that, heavens above, he'd deleted it. This was on par with the Solar System incident. After all, dinosaurs were extinct, why the blazes would he ever need to know about them?

"I tend to devote my studies to more useful pursuits," Sherlock finally said, and Anderson smirked at him, actually smirked, the little snot.

Sherlock smirked back. "I see you've been having problems with your wife," he continued, and Anderson's face twisted into a scowl. "My my, she's started refusing to do your laundry, has she? That is terrible, especially considering Donovan's moved on to Gregson, really, that woman needs to start carrying her own deodorant in her purse. It seems both your woman have gone off yo-"

He broke off as John elbowed him.

John elbowed him!

He was stunned into silence and Anderson took the opportunity to cut in.

"At least I have a woman," he replied, which wasn't the most intelligent comeback but you know, it was the principle of the matter, having the last word and all. "Goodnight John," he added, and strode off, casting a discreet glance in Donovan's direction as he did so.

Sherlock finally recovered himself and turned to John with a glare.

"That was rude," John said, and sounded disappointed. Anger, Sherlock could deal with, but disappointment tended to cut deep into him and bring up all those despised feelings that he hated thinking about.

"That was Anderson," Sherlock pointed out, as though it explained everything, but John was shaking his head.

"No, Sherlock, that was rude. And don't start telling me that Anderson's an idiot, because to you everyone who's not 10x above average intelligence is an idiot. To you, I'm an idiot."

Sherlock opened his mouth to protest but John barelled on.

"Anderson actually knows a lot about that stuff. I found it interesting." He paused and took a breath, then gave Sherlock a slight smile, which in John-language meant that the lesson about how not to be socially awkward was over and whatever transgression Sherlock had made was forgiven. "Now that that's over with, let's get back to the flat, I'm exhausted. Have you eaten?"

Sherlock nodded mutely, but his brain was stuck on 'really, that's amazing' and 'I found it interesting'. This was not how the world worked. What if John didn't think he was amazing any more? Oh, it seemed like a childish thing to worry about, but right now it was a very real concern. A very real danger.

Sherlock was the amazing one. The brilliant one.

His brain worked furiously as they exited the building and hailed a cab. He would just have to regain John's attentions. Prove to him that he was the one worthy of praise. Not Anderson, and certainly not dinosaurs.

Challenge accepted.

* * *

**A/N: It's been quite a while since I wrote anything Sherlock, so constructive criticism is greatly appreciated! Please and thank you.**

**First time posting in this fandom too, so I'm a bit nervous.**


	2. Commence Operation John

John Watson prided himself on being a patient man. Well, he sort of had to be, given his occupation (part-time general practitioner, full-time Sherlock carer). He liked to think of himself as striking a healthy balance between stoically putting up with whatever life threw at him and learning to enjoy the peaceful times when they came.

So he was most definitely not paranoid when he woke up one morning and managed to spend a whole two hours in bed reading (so sue him, he was allowed to have lazy days, he had more than earned them) without once hearing a bang, crash or smelling smoke from downstairs. No. Not paranoid at all. Not even suspicious. Just… mildly curious, that was all.

Deciding it was high time he got up (couldn't be too lazy, he was an army man after all), he headed into the living room with trepidation, fully expecting to see Sherlock lying in the charred, smoking remains of their kitchen after some sort of chemical mishap involving acid.

To his relief, his flatmate was sprawled on the couch doing a marvellous impression of a pretzel - head resting on a cushion on the floor, legs flung up over the couch's armrest and laptop balanced precariously on his knees as he typed furiously away at something.

"Good morning," John greeted, pottering into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea.

"Morning. You're up late," Sherlock observed, rotating his head nearly 180 degrees to peer over his shoulder at John. "I see you've been reading. New MacBride novel, was it?"

"Now how," John said as he switched the kettle on, "Could you possibly know that?" No matter how many times it happened, he never tired of hearing Sherlock's observations. It always seemed so obvious after the visual cues had been pointed out, and never ceased to amaze him.

To his surprise, Sherlock grinned, gracefully twisting around to seat himself on the couch. He did his usual praying mantis impersonation, tapping his fingertips together under his chin. "You obviously woke up an hour or so ago; there's no sleep in your eyes and your dressing gown is creased as though you'd been sitting in bed in it. You've been in your room for an hour but your laptop's out here; you don't have much else in there to keep you occupied. Those marks on your thumb indicate you've been turning pages, probably about 50 or so, the size of a large novel. I've noticed MacBride books lying about the flat recently and after you went to the library yesterday they mostly vanished, ergo it stands to reason that you returned them all and borrowed a new one."

John opened his mouth to say 'brilliant' but at that moment the kettle began to make rather ominous sounds, whistling angrily and producing some truly alarming bubbling noises as steam gushed from its spout. John hurriedly moved to switch it off at the powerpoint, flapping a hand in the steam to waft it away.

"Sherlock! Did you put something in here?" he demanded, grimacing as an unholy stench hit his nostrils. He glanced over his shoulder at Sherlock, and to his surprise, his flatmate's usually impeccable poise was momentarily broken, as he looked startled for a moment before quickly pasting a frown on his face.

"What?" Sherlock asked, leaping to his feet. He hurdled the coffee table and bounded over to John, grabbing the kettle and shaking it vigorously. John inched backwards to avoid being splattered with whatever was in there.

"You destroyed my bile and soda mix!" Sherlock exclaimed, shooting John a look of such dismay that for a moment he actually felt guilty before he remembered that bile and soda was not something he wanted in contact with the place where he made his tea. Ever.

"I thought we'd talked about this," John replied, confiscating the kettle and emptying it into the sink. "You get the bottom two shelves of the fridge, and in summer you can have the toaster, but the kettle is off-limits."

"What else was I meant to use to bring the mixture to a precise boiling point?!" Sherlock pointed out, and John raised a hand.

"No. You don't get to sound reasonable about this." Abandoning all hope of a cup of tea, he set about preparing his breakfast while Sherlock retired back to the couch. John ignored him. If he was going to sulk, let him be. John should be the one sulking! It really wasn't fair sometimes.

Sherlock was lying in the exact same position when John re-entered the living room an hour later. It was his day off work so he was hoping to get some grocery shopping done, as during his breakfast-making he had discovered that the only edible thing they had left was Weet-Bix.

"It's in the bathroom," Sherlock said without looking up from his screen.

"What?" John asked, as he reached for his coat.

"Your watch," Sherlock continued. "You were glancing at your wrist and around the room as you came in; evidently upon not immediately seeing it you gave up on it. You left it on the side of the sink after you showered this morning."

"Right," John said, then added, "Thanks," a touch awkwardly, because Sherlock still wasn't looking at him. He wasn't sure if the other was still annoyed, or just in one of his I-am-a-genius-therefore-common-courtesy-is-below-me moods.

"You might want to bring an umbrella," Sherlock added.

John glanced out the window. It was perfectly sunny.

Obviously noticing his doubts, Sherlock sighed. He closed his laptop and leaned forward. "It might be sunny now but there's rain and storms over Ipswich. Coupled with a strong south-westerly wind, by midday the weather here will be utterly miserable."

"Ah!" John grinned at him. "You're a weather reporter now, are you?"

A smirk tugged at the edges of Sherlock's mouth. "Come now John, you know I'm brilliant at anything when I put my mind to it."

"Maybe you could put your mind towards the art of cleaning," John suggested. "That was a not so subtle hint that this room is a bit of a mess, by the way."

"I did realise that." Sherlock tilted his head thoughtfully. "I suppose it is a bit inconvenient to have to clear a space every time I need a flat surface."

"Exactly. Well… you get onto that then, and I'll be back by lunchtime." John paused to grab his watch. "Anything else I should know before I get going?"

Sherlock gave a dismissive nod, bending over to rifle through a stack of papers on the coffee table. "Don't bother dropping by Sarah's, your suspicions are correct, she has gone off you."

_Well, thanks,_ John thought a bit sourly, making a mental note to cross 'flowers' off his shopping list. He couldn't bring himself to feel truly annoyed about Sherlock's blase attitude towards his dating life though; he and Sarah had been growing apart for weeks now (although he refused to admit any time soon that said flowers had been a breaking-up gift).

Sherlock rambled on: "You don't actually need to buy milk, we have plenty; Mrs Hudson is out so don't bother popping in to warn her about the imminent rain I mentioned, and the average Tyrannosaurus Rex lived about thirty years."

John nodded along before doing a double take.

"Sorry, what?"

"You heard me." Sherlock was stoically refusing to hold his gaze, instead busying himself with the papers and shooting John small glances every few seconds.

A slow grin spread across John's face. "Anderson really got to you then, did he?"

"Of course not!" Sherlock snapped.

Oh ho ho! John couldn't help but be amused. Truth be told, he had almost completely forgotten about the events of last night's 'party' (if it could even be called a party, the celebrations had been pretty lame and the champagne wasn't exactly of the highest quality).

"Right. Well." John tried and failed to suppress his smirk, though he did manage to restrain the full blown laughter. He had a feeling Sherlock wouldn't really appreciate it. "You have fun looking up more dinosaur facts while I'm out, then."

"Ha, ha." Sherlock was outright scowling now.

"What did the triceratops sit on?"

"Not funny."

"Its tricera-bottom!"

"Yes, yes, John, your infantile wit never fails to astound me." With a huff, Sherlock retired to the kitchen, shutting the door behind him. John bit back his (manly) giggles and departed for the shops, not forgetting to snag his umbrella from the stand on the way out.

* * *

Things were not going according to plan.

Sherlock had spent the night mulling over the situation he found himself faced with. And the more he thought about it, the more disconcerted he felt. John had never before expressed an interest in Anderson's life – in fact, Sherlock had thought his flatmate shared his disdain for the man.

Perhaps John's initial admiration of Sherlock's powers of deduction had worn off. _Maybe_, Sherlock thought, _he isn't impressed by me any more... and if he's no longer impressed, what if he decides to leave?_ Sherlock knew better than to kid himself – after all, the only reason John hadn't left in a fit of rage after finding decomposing toes in the marmalade jar was because he found Sherlock's extraordinary mental faculties intriguing... right?

_One can never jump to a conclusion without first running some tests,_ Sherlock had thought, and so that morning he had deduced John's reading habits – and John had not responded with his usual praise, instead getting annoyed over the experiment in the kettle (and okay, maybe that one had been going a bit far, Sherlock knew how much John relied on his morning cuppa).

So now Sherlock was left with quite a conundrum. If John was no longer impressed by his deductions, he'd just have to find other methods to keep John thinking he was brilliant, hence preventing him from leaving. Because, much as Sherlock hated to admit it, he had become... _fond_ of his jumper-wearing, daytime-telly-watching flatmate (oh, ugh, _sentiment_, never to be repeated).

The problem was only worsened by the fact that Sherlock now had a large number of useless dinosaur facts taking up space in his memory (he was determined to challenge Anderson to a face-off the next time they met).

So. Operation Dazzle John Watson... actually, no, that sounded too cheesy. Operation Ensure That John Continues To Think I Am Brilliant... too long. How about simply Operation John – that was nice and succinct.

Operation John was to begin immediately.

* * *

**A/N: This part has been written and up on the kink meme for a while, but procrastination caused me to fail to post it here xD**

**Thanks a bunch to everyone who faved, alerted or reviewed the first chapter, especially Ulura, gemstone1234, toeki, Black Light Brightness, and the anonymous guest.**

**CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM IS GREATLY APPRECIATED! Soon I'll get to the 'desperately scrambling' part of the prompt, I swear.**


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